Cinnamon is a beautiful desktop environment created by Linux Mint team. Users who are unhappy with the default Ubuntu desktop environment Unity, consider installing Cinnamon one of the top things to do after installing Ubuntu. But there is a problem with Cinnamon 2.0 and Ubuntu 13.10. Installing Cinnamon in Ubuntu 13.10 breaks Unity.

I installed Cinnamon from their stable PPA, after fiddling with it for some time, I logged out and tried to go back to good old Unity. Surprisingly, I could not log in to Unity session any more. Selecting Ubuntu Default (i.e. Unity) at login screen just resulted in couple of screen flickers, a quick error message and then back to the login screen.

While developers at Cinnamon have fixed this issue, it has not been released to the official stable PPA yet. So what can you do in this case? How to fix broken Unity by Cinnamon in Ubuntu 13.10? Do you have to live with it like forever? The answer is no.

Fix broken Unity after installing Cinnamon in Ubuntu 13.10

I am going to show you how to quickly fix the broken Unity after installing Cinnamon in the most easy way. Actually this tip came from Michael Webster of Cinnamon team itself. All you have to do is to uninstall Cinnamon files from upstart session.

Open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and use the following command:

sudo rm -f /usr/share/upstart/sessions/cinnamon-se*

This will remove the cinnamon-session.conf and cinnamon-settings-daemon.conf files. Log out, and then at login screen choose Ubuntu Default. You should be successfully logged in to the Unity desktop environment. I hope this tip helps you in fixing broken Unity after installing Cinnamon. Questions, suggestions are most welcomed.

About Abhishek Prakash

I am Abhishek Prakash, 'creator' of It's F.O.S.S. Working as a software professional. I am an avid Linux lover and Open Source enthusiast. I use Ubuntu and believe in sharing knowledge. Apart from Linux, I love classic detective mystery. Huge fan of Agatha Christie work.